


Hella Dave

by kbokbok



Series: Hella Dave [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Afterlife, Alpha Dave POV, Child Abuse, Everybody Lives, Self-Indulgent, but mostly in the past, or rather is born again
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-11
Updated: 2016-12-11
Packaged: 2018-09-07 20:18:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8814835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kbokbok/pseuds/kbokbok
Summary: After everything comes the reward: a new life, whether you deserved it or not. If you wanted it or not.When the kids win, they have a new world to rule as gods. But the game is...indiscriminate with who it revives. Everyone. It revives everyone.





	

You wake up knowing you’re dead. It was the last thought you had when you went down, too, so it’s nothing to get your shit somersaulting all over the place, causing some sick nasty mess. There’s a hard surface under your back and you’re breathing. One hand drifts to the middle of your chest. Your sword’s gone. It was broken anyway. 

It’s with a sort of tranquility that you accept that it’s finished. Everything is. It’s all over, done like a turkey leftovers in January—half eaten, half garbage, a life full of plot holes and trailing threads. All someone else’s problem.

Or, it was supposed to be, if Rosie was right.

You open your eyes to what’s next.

When your brain decides to focus, it does so on a very familiar ceiling—the Sistine Chapel, but with Ben Stiller as God and your cat, S’wet Bro, as Adam. The inner peace doesn’t break so much as hit a wall at seventy miles per hour. Splat. Just a pancake of a serious, spiritual moment. You’re lying on the floor of the east bathroom from the house in LA. You…accept this fact, and then you’re curling up like a pill bug, giggling helplessly. 

Every time the spasms start trailing off, you open your eyes to the goddamn gold leaf on the jpeg’d fleur de lis all over the floor molding and—you’re gone again. You don’t know if it’s because this is the last place you would be or if of course you would show up here after dying in a doomed battle with the alien fish dictator. It’s all in the same ironic hell/heaven you may well have crafted for yourself.

A gasp from behind stops the giggles dead. You turn over, unclasping the shaking hands from the back of your neck.

There’s a…boy in the doorway. Bigger than a kindergartener but smaller than a high schooler. He’s probably not human, given the glowing lines embedded in his face, very Tron. They disappear under some wicked sharp anime shades. He’s got the tips of two fingers on the wall behind him, like he isn’t sure of his balance. You would be on edge about the Crocker-red, but the kid’s brow is—open. Some mix of hopeful and concerned.

And he looks so much like Rosie. And like you, yeah, but Rosie.

You sit up, wrists on knees, try to keep your composure, then drop it. Everything’s done. There’s no need to keep it up. “Do I..?” You kip up in a flash, but don’t come closer when the boy flinches back. Rosie told you that there would be—not kids, not really—descendants that would be biologically like you. She could see that they would come when the world was mostly dead, and that they would be so smart, so capable. That maybe they could fix the world when you would inevitably fail. You’ve thought a lot about those kids, and gave yours a name, along with the shitty Houston apartment that—stains, roaches, and all—was your first home. “Dirk?”

The kid’s face closes like a sprung trap, barely a flare of anger before everything vanishes. “It seems not.” And he’s outta there, flash-stepping down the hall. Clumsy kid: you can hear him slam into the wall, then—more faintly—another crash at the end of the next hallway. Sounds like he took out a vase that time.

“What in the sweet hells was that.”

 

The day of your death, you could have been pulling social security, if it hadn’t first been ravaged by good ol’ Uncle Sam around the turn of the century, then completely depleted by a bunch of clowns. You need glasses to read, your knees hurt after a half-dozen flash steps, and you no longer understand The Youth™. The point being, you’re old.

You’ve learned how and when to take your time. Like, immediately chasing after and confronting your…relative would feel satisfying and less like you were being rejected, but you’re old enough to stop doing dumb, useless shit that fucks everything up. Mostly. So you close the door and scoop a few handfuls of water from the 14 karat gold seashell sink (the pearls are motherfucking rhinestones, makes you smile every time) to drink, then over your face. Dragging your fingers back through your hair, you brace yourself and look.

You were an old liver-spotted geezer when you died, no way for hair to go grey but a face full of wrinkles (after you finally stopped botoxing; Rosie had actually smiled to see you. She said it made you look kinder, and it felt like forgiveness for—well). The you in the mirror is too young by about thirty years. You throw off your blazer and yank out your shirttails, fumble buttons, check; you’re not missing any scars—not even the one over your heart, where there never was a chance to heal. You spend too long looking at that mark, filling the indent with the pads of your fingers, then your knuckles, which fit better. Maybe now you’re destined to forever be clutching at your pearls, clicking two puzzle pieces together as you agony-aunt your way through life. Afterlife. 

Shaking it off, you put yourself back together. You settle your shades and open the door just in time to hear a sword fight going on. From the direction, you’d guess it’s in the foyer.

Nothing to do but snag a Sord from a statue on the way.

Lurching slightly (gawd, you really did get younger), you nearly flash-step into the middle of it, whatever it is. There’s a couple guys fighting it out all over your vaulted entrance hall, one with his sword already broken. A teenager and a grown-ass man, white-haired and dark with freckles, like you and like the clumsy kid from before. Neither of them speak, not even grunting when they impact.

You summon up your best “bitch out the board” voice (much more intimidating than any version of your director voice; you like the actors you work with) and step up to the dead center of the hall. “What in the holy names of Sweet-ass Bro and Hellacious Jeff has you dudes in a goddamn tizzy.” It echoes grandly, which pleases your aesthetic sense, and now you’ve got two…relatives (???) staring at you from opposites sides, chests heaving.

The teenager is…a young you? Is there more than one now? It’s easier to see when he’s not a blur, but that’s vintage Dave, circa 1992. That was a good year for you, in hindsight: drop-rolling out of foster care like it was going out of style had sucked at first, as well as the actual dick you’d sucked to get by, but that was also the year you met the dick who would eventually fund your first movie. All the memories, brought up by this little mini-me. He’s even wearing the same shades, even though you didn’t get them until you were almost thirty and had known Stiller for a few years. 

He’s so dead-faced it’s hells disturbing, wearing some weird-ass cape and a gear on the front of his shirt.

The other one is in his thirties, dressed as a dudebro from his hat down to his shiny gym shoes, except for the anime shades to match red-not-Dirk from before. You see him swallow once, but nothing more in the way of emotional reaction. He’s a statue, now that he’s stopped moving. He’s got Rosie’s fine nose, but that’s your jaw, your lips, your heavy freckles.

You rest the Sord against the floor, frowning at the dudebro. “Dirk?”

The guy ducks his head to hide behind his hat and fucking absconds.

You note that he’s going to the east wing, sigh, and turn to your younger self. The kid has tucked away his broken sword into his strife specibus, which doesn’t spit anything out in defiance. Either that was the only thing in there, or…

“Dude, don’t tell me your strifekind is broken swords. The unironic melodrama will slay me.” You javelin-toss your Sord into the umbrella stand, the one you convinced people was made out of real elephant scrotum. “You know, that is the second one I’ve scared off like that. Is it some language barrier thing? Did “Dirk” somehow come to mean, like, “fuck off” or “have you ever considered changing religions?” I mean, it starts to get a guy down.” You check pockets for some gum, come up with a packet of sugarless cinnamon. “When his own family won’t stay in the same room for a…not a reunion, just a union? But that starts sounding like matrimony, and nobody hits the like button for incest.” You savor the fresh feel of new gum for a solid five seconds. “Nobody.”

Kiddo finally takes the next pause as an invitation to talk. “I’ve never seen anything scare Bro off like that in my life. Up top, Future Dave.” 

Well, you ice that shit the hell out. “Uncool, junior, that’s my bro-son you’re talking about. Right? I’m not confusing this? Cuz he is the spitting image of the Strilonde gene pool.”

The only sign that Lil Dave’s taken aback is the pause before he responds. “Uh, it’s complicated.”

You set your shades on top of your head to give Junior the full eye-roll. “Draw me a picture. And explain cyborg-Dirk.”

Baby Davie looks thoroughly unnerved at your bare face, but folds those emotions under the same blank mask. “I have no fucking clue about any robo-Bros, that’s Dirk’s wheelhouse. But, the long and short of it is,” and here he talks a paragraph that, for all it’s usefulness, might just be a block of white noise and disconcerting sound artifacts, “is that there was a game. Me, Rose, John, and Jade played it, but we came to a dead end and we had to restart to get a chance at winning, also known as surviving. Uh, everybody who plays the game is ecto-biological clones or mixes and come to earth on meteors. In the first game, Bro came down on a meteor like twenty years before me, and he raised me really shittily until I was thirteen and the game started. The game went on, he died fighting a big bad, we restarted and snuck into the restart with some trolls from another no-win game. It took three years to get to the new game, your universe. In your universe, you, Rose, Jade, and John all came down before the ecto-parents, Dirk, Roxy, Jake, and Jane. Most of the meteors came down in the twentieth century, but for some fucked-up reason, the game dumped Roxy and Dirk in waterworld, like three centuries behind everybody else. We won against the big bad, went to go into the new universe that we get when we win the game, and ended up here. Somehow. It looks like all the major versions of everybody made it, if you and me are here.”

“…I understood maybe half of that. Who the hell are John and Jake?”

The slightest hint of a sneer was the second sign of emotion on Mini-Me’s face. “No, you’ve got them mixed up. Do I actually have to draw you a picture? It’s, like, pairs. In the pre-scratch universe, my universe, we were young and Bro—Dirk, I guess—was old. In the post-scratch universe, your universe, that universe’s Dave—that’s you—is old and Dirk’s young. The young one is the one that always plays the game, the guardian—the old one, aka you—is a non-player. The other three pairs are Rose and Roxy, John and Jane, and Jade and Jake. You probably don’t know John and Jade in your universe because that side of the ecto-family tree has, like, grandparents instead of parents. That’s how it was in my universe, anyways. And, also, they died really early, if your universe is like mine.”

You already can’t stand this kid. His explanations suck, he’s throwing out bunch of nonsense words (what the hell is ecto-biology and what’s a scratch and what the fuck does he mean by game), and the little shit is acting like it’s first grade math. “Whatever. Since I died too, it sounds like whatever’s going on has re-launched all of the Striders. In my crib.”

“Not quite. Me and Bro didn’t start strifing down here. C’mon.” Chibi Dave leads you out the front door and partway up the driveway, then turns around and points.

There’s two towers on the McMansion, one on the east, the other on the west. Home & Garden itself used the word “phallic” to describe them, which was the only way you agreed to do the shoot in the first place, along with a few other brand-relevant stipulations, including pretending that that fanciful hellscape of a high-tech boudoir was actually where you slept. Now those towering protuberances don’t end in something “suspiciously” mushroom-shaped; instead it looks like the top of two versions of the Houston apartment had been copy-pasted and then braced with a minimal amount of rebar. There are frankly hazardous ladders leading to the fire escape and the front door. (The fantastically vein-like rain gutters that forked and twisted on the shafts of the tower remained.)

“I haven’t decided if this ruins my dick-towers or makes them seventeen times better.”

**Author's Note:**

> Well, first installment. I've got at least one more chapter mostly done, then who knows.
> 
> Also, I was kinda split on young Dave's explanation of the situation. Either he would load it up with silly half-truths and overblown metaphors (as is his way) or he would realize that there is nothing more confusing than the truth. I decided to go with truth, since he was kind of off-balance from Hella Dave [who, from his conversation with Dirk, is set up to be basically the epitome of Stridenasty and is gonna be treated to that expectation from basically all the Striders] breaking one of the biggest cool-kid rules.
> 
> Anyways, hope you like it! The other drabble in the series is just a snatch of a future scene that's going to show up in this story, edited.


End file.
